I’ll comment and join in the discussion in some detail in that thread, but I wanted to start with a few very high-level thoughts that might be things you haven’t considered before.
Let me start this way:
HOW A “NORMAL” PERSON PROBABLY THINKS THINGS WORK
In our mind, I think a BBA GM thinks about their city and its surrounding areas as being filled with people, and that our goal is to find the sweet spot with ticket prices that will optimize revenue—that if we simply tweak prices up or down, then do the basic math we’ll be good (20,000 fans at $20 per ticket are better than 10,000 fans at $30, right?). In this model we see people in our city as folks we have to sway, and that’s that.
It’s that way in real life, right? Outside a few very unique examples, a MLB’s team’s attendance is purely determined by how many people in the area. In real life, for example, a major league team would not survive in Yellow Springs because…well…population is horrible.
And the OOTP model works just enough like this that if we wave our hands a little and just pretend the Yellow Springs has lots of people, and maybe draws from Dayton and Columbus, and Cincinnati, and even Cleveland and Akron, that, well, we can convince ourselves that this model is “true.” I mean, as long as we don't think too hard it almost seems to work this way. But once you start asking questions, you see there is -something else- going on. Things don't always work like you'd think they would. (See Des Moines 2039-2040 coming soon here!)
WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT OOTP
I need to take a moment and do one of my normal disclaimers. I do not know how this works. I only know what I see, and I can only suggest what I think. For myself, I’ll say that a lot of times I hear people say “I can’t figure this out” about a lot of OOTP things, and when I hear that I think “no, what you can’t do is break your own mindset for long enough to figure out the right way to look at the problem.”
I don’t mean that to sound snotty.
I mean, there are probably better ways to spend your time than digging into OOTP algorithms. But I admit I find that enjoyable. I like to get a flavor for how things work on my own—for example, the results engine. I know pretty much how it works because it works in a completely logical fashion as soon as you realize that the game’s design is made specifically to create ratings out of historical stats. Once you think hard about that for a few days, you can see exactly what’s happening, and then you see how OOTP then does a bunch of back-tracking to make the rest of the baseball world feel like it’s sabermetically solid.
In the case of the financial engine, it is my opinion that the game takes a similar approach.
I suggest (but again, do not know), that the game has at its most important design goal that there always be enough money floating around each team to keep it solvent enough to keep the engine from crashing. [Aside, this was actually a thing back in the early days of the game…teams would run out of money and the game would literally crash to desktop.]
At the end of the day, what I think this means is that the financial engine has a series of relationships and constraints that make our cash flow—specifically that related to attendance and revenue—into a big, intertwined, and multi-dependent mess. In other words, in my mind, there is a reasonable chance that we are basically fighting for a communal revenue pile—or, in other words, since overall revenue is controlled, revenue I make removes revenue from other teams.
That’s probably stated in too bold of a fashion there, but my point is that I’ve found it easier to think about the system as just that—a system wherein everything works together to avoid either run-away situations or crashes.
Only at that point does it fiddle with things enough for us to believe it’s working within its community like a “normal” sports franchise works.
SO, WHAT DOES THAT REALLY MEAN?
I dunno. Except, that maybe I do.
I mean, there are a lot of moving parts to play with. The issue here is that we have multiple situations among teams, and that settings are, of course, named in shitty ways for us human beings to understand and figure things out.
Look at Des Moines, for example. The game says they are a “Big” market. But relative to most BBA teams, that is like a movie place selling you a 32 ounce “medium” soda. Des Moines is a small-ish market relative to its BBA competitors. Its fan loyalty is Poor—and relative to BBA, poor is essentially destitute. Its fan interest has been mostly in the low 50s for most of the past decade…which is really, really low (the league has averaged high 70s).
Compare this to expansion team Wichita, with its Very Big Market size (which is really kind of medium relative), its Average fan loyalty, and fan interest that (until this year) was in the 70s and 80s after falling from its 100 starting point.
If Wichita ($16) and Des Moines ($6.75) both raise ticket prices to $20 right this minute, it’s likely that Des Moines’ gate revenue would go to zero almost immediately, and Wichita’s would drop off—though it’s possible Wichita’s would hang in there. Stu has been slowly raising prices to offset reduced attendance (or vice versa, has been seeing a reduction in attendance due to raised prices). He may be hitting a bit of an ankle. Note, though, here is a table of Des Moines’ attendance/revenue performance from 2038 onward, with 2041 projected off its performance to date:
| Des Moines | 2038 | 2039 | 2040 | 2041 (Proj) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ticket | $11.40 | $12.13 | $7.24 | $6.75 |
| Attendance | 2,130,926 | 2,123,052 | 3,238,873 | 3,506,835 |
| ST+Gate Revenue | $24,284,516 | $25,755,083 | $27,629,519 | $33,895,658 |
| Fan Interest | 57 | 53 | 54 | 67 |
2038-2039: The Kernels raised ticket prices a bit and lost attendance while making a little more money. But while doing that, their fan interest dropped even worse.
2039-2040: This time Ed took the opposite approach, and dropped prices a ton. The team drew 1.1M new fans, and made $2M in new revenue. The fan interest bumped in the middle of the year, then settled at just a touch higher. I note here that the entire league averaged an increase of attendance of 120K fans over the year. Des Moines' 1.1M fan increase literally represents almost ten teams worth of that increase.
2040-2041: An additional price cut has resulted in rock-solid sell-outs every game in Des Moines. The are going to break 3.5M in attendance and will make north of $6M more in gate. Their fan interest is almost in the respectable range. I do agree that they are probably a bit past due for a bit of a raise in ticket prices…but in all seriousness, deep cuts are exactly what this franchise needed to do in order to get its financial feet underneath it.
At the end of the day, I think the best way to look at how the financial engine can best be used is to stop comparing Team A to Team B, but instead look at Team A across the seasons, and make decisions based on their specific state regarding fan interest, winning rates, fan loyalty, and market sizes.
When you do this, I think it becomes somewhat clear that “one size fits all” approaches (RAISE YOUR TICKET PRICES GODDAMNIT! or FORCE EVERYONE TO SET PRICES AT X!) serve to cause more damage than they help—or at least serve to restrict GMS from using tools to their best service.
